Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The Washington Post: 500,000 Coronavirus Deaths Visualized: A Number Almost Too Large To Grasp
Here are three ways to visualize the monstrous death toll of the coronavirus in this country. (Galocha and Berkowitz, 2/21)
The Washington Post: History’s Deadliest Pandemics: Plague, Smallpox, Flu, Covid-19
The novel coronavirus took just a few months to sweep the globe. More than 2.5 million people around the world have died, including 500,000 in the United States. How many more will die, how countries will recover — the answers remain elusive as the disease continues raging. But history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated. Here is a look at how pandemics have remade the world. (Rosenwald, 2/22)
The Atlantic: When Will Life Be 'Normal' Again, Post-Pandemic?
The end of the coronavirus pandemic is on the horizon at last, but the timeline for actually getting there feels like it shifts daily, with updates about viral variants, vaccine logistics, and other important variables seeming to push back the finish line or scoot it forward. When will we be able to finally live our lives again? Pandemics are hard to predict accurately, but we have enough information to make some confident guesses. A useful way to think about what’s ahead is to go season by season. In short: Life this spring will not be substantially different from the past year; summer could, miraculously, be close to normal; and next fall and winter could bring either continued improvement or a moderate backslide, followed by a near-certain return to something like pre-pandemic life. (Pinsker, 2/22)
Los Angeles Times: For Two COVID Patients, Life And Death Rests On Intubation
They call it el tubo, and it haunts places like South Los Angeles, the Latino-majority neighborhoods hit harder by COVID-19 than almost anywhere in the U.S. Intubation has become more than a medical procedure. It represents the terrible crossroad of this disease: the moment patients must decide whether to have a tube inserted into their trachea so a machine can take over their breathing. (Mozingo, 2/19)
Politico: How Covid-19 Could Make Americans Healthier
If you tried to design a weapon customized to exploit every weakness in the U.S. health care system, you might have come up with SARS-CoV-2: the novel coronavirus. The pandemic caused by that spiky virus, now in its second year, has rampaged across the country in part because our disease defense system — the critical but neglected discipline known as “public health” — has been so starved of resources for so long that it had been effectively dismantled before the coronavirus arrived. Without robust disease surveillance, stockpiles of emergency equipment and a skilled public health work force, we were all but defenseless. (Kenen, 2/18)
The New York Times: Positive Coronavirus Test? Canadians Worry Their Neighbors Will Find Out
For a time, Cortland Cronk, 26, was Canada’s most famous — and infamous — coronavirus patient. Mr. Cronk, a traveling salesman, went viral after testing positive in November and recounting his story of being infected while traveling for work to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He was called a virus-spreader, a job-killer, a liar and a sleaze. Online memes painted him as the Grinch, since subsequent outbreaks led to restrictions against Christmas parties. Many people, including a newspaper columnist, made elaborate fun of his name. (Porter, 2/21)
The New York Times: ‘I Am Worth It’: Why Thousands Of Doctors In America Can’t Get A Job
Dr. Kristy Cromblin knew that as the descendant of Alabama sharecroppers and the first person in her family to go to college, making it to medical school might seem like an improbable dream. Her parents watched in proud disbelief as she inched closer to that goal, enrolling in a medical school in Barbados and enlisting in the military with plans to serve one day as a flight surgeon. Then came an unexpected hurdle: A contentious divorce led Dr. Cromblin to take seven years away from medical school to care for her two sons. In 2012, she returned for her final year, excited to complete her exams and apply for residency, the final step in her training. But no one had told Dr. Cromblin that hospital residency programs, which have been flooded with a rising number of applications in recent years, sometimes use the Electronic Residency Application Service software program to filter out various applications, whether they’re from students with low test scores or from international medical students. (Goldberg, 2/19)
Bloomberg: How The Pandemic Is Transforming Hospital Design
For health-care institutions, the pandemic has been a powerful engine of transformation, for better and worse. It’s accelerated the trend to adopt remote technology and move care out of big acute-care complexes to ambulatory settings closer to patients. It’s exposed the huge disparities in hospitalizations and deaths by poorer and minority patients. And it’s changing the ways hospitals look and feel, as the extraordinary stresses that Covid has put on staff, patients and families has health providers focusing on wellness as well as disease treatment. (Russell, 2/23)
Also —
The New York Times: Would Americans Have More Babies If The Government Paid Them?
A Republican senator, Mitt Romney, joined Democrats this month in supporting an idea: a monthly child allowance for parents. One reason, he said, was to increase the number of births. Family policies have lots of goals, including decreasing child poverty, helping parents manage work and family, and improving children’s health and education. But would a child allowance increase fertility? (Miller, 2/17)
The Atlantic: Levaquin And Cipro Side Effects And The Drug Label Problem
Beyond being difficult to ascribe to a single circumstance, suicide is a vanishingly rare outcome for people taking fluoroquinolones, which were until recently some of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in the United States. No study has proved that taking fluoroquinolones causes people to kill themselves, and the number of fluoroquinolone-associated suicides that have been reported to the FDA is much lower than the U.S. suicide rate would lead one to expect. But in hundreds of cases in which people killed themselves after taking the drugs, either they or their family members blamed the fluoroquinolone at least partially for their death. And the FDA’s numbers for post-fluoroquinolone suicides and pain are likely an undercount, since doctors and patients don’t tell the agency about every problem patients experience after taking a drug. (Khazan, 2/18)
The Washington Post: A Woman’s Laborious Search Uncovered The Probable Cause Of Her Searing Abdominal Pain. Getting A Doctor To Help Was Much Harder.
Timothy M. Whitney remembers his first impression of Juliane Potter Marx as she stood in his Bellingham, Wash., office on April 15, 2020, clutching a sheaf of papers and leaning heavily against a wall. Sitting, his new patient told him, was too painful. “She failed the eyeball test,” the plastic surgeon recalled, referring to the quick once over doctors use to assess a patient. Despite a mask that obscured much of her face, Whitney said it was clear to him “this patient was really uncomfortable.” (Boodman, 2/20)
The New York Times: Venezuelan Women Lose Access To Contraception, And Control Of Their Lives
The moment Johanna Guzmán, 25, discovered she was going to have her sixth child she began to sob, crushed by the idea of bringing another life into a nation in such decay. For years, as Venezuela spiraled deeper into an economic crisis, she and her husband had scoured clinics and pharmacies for any kind of birth control, usually in vain. They had a third child. A fourth. A fifth. (Turkewitz and Herrera, 2/20)
